Open Door Policy - Laying down the policy

Photo by: kalafoto

Two sets of voices insisted that the United States abandon its passive
approach in China and take the lead to shore up the principle of equal
privilege. One set came from Britain. Although not averse to securing
special privileges of its own, it remained the principal great-power
champion of the Open Door idea. In fact, the British-controlled Shanghai
Chamber of Commerce may have been the first to hit upon the phrase in
expressing the view that the whole of China should be opened to foreign
trade. In any case, the scramble for concessions precipitated a sense of
crisis in Britain, whose dominance in the China trade was threatened just
as much as the far smaller U.S. stake. A lengthy debate on the situation
took place in the House of Commons in January 1898, during the course of
which two government speakers invoked the Open Door by name as the
desirable alternative to partition. Three months later the British
government proposed a joint Anglo-American declaration calling for equal
commercial opportunity in China.

The other voices demanding that Washington take bold action to protect
American interests came from within the United States. By 1898, as the
historian Thomas J. McCormick has documented, a chorus of trade
associations, publications, jingoistic politicians, and activist diplomats
urged the McKinley administration to set aside old laissez-faire notions
and actively defend American interests. "We must make our plans to
secure our full share of the great trade which is coming out of the
Orient," the National Association of Manufacturers demanded in
1897. Early the following year, the New York Chamber of Commerce sent
McKinley a petition urging "proper steps" for the
"preservation and protection of … important commercial
interest in the [Chinese] Empire." The press took a similar view.
With Moscow apparently threatening to absorb Manchuria into the Russian
customs area, the
Commercial and Financial Chronicle
demanded a "strong representation in favor of keeping open the
trade on equal terms to all nations." Meanwhile the
New York Tribune
asserted that "commercial interests, which are now great and which
promise one day to be enormous," demanded that the U.S. government
be "deeply involved in China." Activism was essential, it
insisted, contending that "without strenuous insistence by this
Government the indisputable treaty rights of the United States are likely
to be ignored and violated by the more aggressive European powers."

Washington responded cautiously to this pressure, only gradually accepting
the notion that it should play an active role in promoting American
economic interests abroad. The possibility clashed with laissez-faire
notions of economics and governance, ideas that remained influential with
many Americans even in the 1890s. Only the Spanish-American War resolved
the issue in favor of the industrialists and others who advocated bold
action abroad. Following its crushing victory over Spain in the spring of
1898, the United States became the scene of a vast public debate over
whether to annex the Philippines, the former Spanish colony ripe for the
taking if the United States was willing to become a colonial power. The
debate concerned not only the Philippines themselves, of course, but also
the role that the U.S. government would play in the Far East generally,
including China. Advocates of annexation argued that possession of the
Philippines would greatly facilitate American exploitation of the China
market by providing an insular "stepping stone" to the
mainland—a coaling station, naval base, cable relay station, and
observation post that would enhance America's capacity to keep the
door to China open. Although U.S. behavior in the Philippines smacked of
naked colonialism, Americans, including McKinley himself, disavowed any
such intention in China. The United States, McKinley said, desired
"no advantages in the Orient which are not common to all."
Still, in accepting the administrative and military burdens of empire in
the Philippines, the United States signaled a new era of activism on the
Asian mainland.

Hay's Open Door Notes thus formed part of a package of policy
decisions taken in 1898 and 1899, the foremost being the Philippines
annexation, aimed at promoting American commerce in China. The delay
between McKinley's decision and Hay's issuing of the notes
owed mainly to the secretary of state's fears that the other powers
would reject any U.S. initiative that he did not time carefully. New
great-power maneuvering in China during the first months of 1899 kept the
notoriously cautious Hay from acting. But imperial rivalries eased in the
summer, leading Hay to believe that Britain, Japan, Germany, and probably
even Russia would respond favorably to a diplomatic démarche on
behalf of the Open Door. Hay ordered his chief adviser on Far Eastern
affairs, William W. Rockhill, to prepare a statement of U.S. policy.
Rockhill, a champion of the Open Door with a strong sense of the dangers
that would flow from China's disintegration, was only too happy to
oblige. With Alfred Hippisley, an English friend who had served in the
Chinese customs service, Rockhill prepared the six memoranda that Hay sent
to the governments of Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, and France
beginning on 6 September. With the proclamation of the new U.S. policy,
the "scepter of Open Door champion," in McCormick's
words, passed from Great Britain to the United States.

The Open Door policy appeared a natural course of action for the United
States for a variety of reasons. For one thing, proponents were confident
that the United States would be the winner on a level commercial playing
field. U.S. exports to China in 1899 amounted to a bare 1.1 percent of all
U.S. exports, but in absolute terms the China trade was booming, with the
value of U.S. goods shipped to China climbing to $14 million from just $6
million five years earlier. American textiles and oil companies especially
profited, and further growth seemed certain as the U.S. economy revived in
1897. "In the field of trade and commerce," Hay proclaimed
in 1899, "we shall be the keen competitors of the richest and
greatest powers, and they need no warning to be assured that in that
struggle, we shall bring the sweat to their brows."
Banker's Magazine
predicted that "without wars and without military aggression that
nation will secure the widest and best markets which can offer the
cheapest and best goods"; only British wares, it continued, could
rival those of the United States. Some Americans predicted that their
exports would balloon to billions of dollars a year if the U.S. government
could keep the door open.

If the Open Door suited supposed American commercial supremacy, it also
suited U.S. military weakness and aversion to great-power politics. In
Central America and the Caribbean, where the United States towered over
any potential rival, the United States eagerly pursued exclusive economic
privileges. In the Far East, however, the situation was very different.
The Spanish-American War signaled the emergence of the United States as a
major world power with the capacity to project force as far away as the
western Pacific, but it could hardly rival the capabilities of Japan,
Russia, and even the European powers already well-ensconced in China. If
great-power relations in China developed into a game of coercion and
partition, the United States would inevitably lose. The Open Door policy
promised to remove force from the equation and to limit competition to
fields where the United States would likely prevail. The policy, with its
multilateral aspect and emphasis on universal principles, also carried the
advantage of keeping the United States clear of international alliances as
an alternative method of protecting American interests. Even as the United
States emerged as a major power, the vast majority of Americans opposed
foreign entanglements, and the McKinley administration saw no reason to
risk its popularity. An alliance with Britain, the most likely candidate
based on shared interests, was out of the question because of widespread
Anglophobia. The other good possibility, Japan, showed an off-putting
inconsistency and opportunism in China. The Open Door policy, by contrast,
promised to win the cooperation of the other powers without sacrificing
the administration's political standing, reducing American freedom
of action, or creating military burdens that Washington was unwilling to
assume.

Perhaps most importantly, the Open Door policy suited Americans
ideologically by sustaining their traditional aversion to colonialism and
their commitment to liberal principles. Although the United States
repeatedly violated its own supposed anticolonial commitments in the late
nineteenth century and maintained quasi-imperial control over Latin
America, a substantial portion of congressional and public opinion abided
by a perception of the United States as a fundamentally anticolonial
country. The resistance that the McKinley administration confronted during
the debate over Philippine annexation in mid-1898 attested to the strength
of anti-imperial opinion. The Open Door offered an ideal solution because
it permitted the United States to obtain markets in China while assuming
the moral high ground. The notes, in the words of historian Matthew Frye
Jacobson, represented "an imperialist economics in the guise of
anticolonialism." Both avid expansionists and old-guard devotees of
laissez-faire could unite behind the Open Door idea. The policy also
appealed because it promised to sustain Chinese unity and give the Chinese
access to the most modern goods and ideas that Westerners had to offer.
The policy thus meshed well with Americans' self-perception as a
force for modernization and enlightenment in backward areas of the world.
One of the foremost promoters of the Open Door in the United States, the
English author and lecturer Lord Charles Beresford, struck the theme in
characteristic terms a few months before Hay's notes. Proclaiming
that the Open Door represented a "grand, chivalrous, [and] noble
sentiment in regard to what should be done with weaker nations," he
asserted that such an approach would not only advance "the
interests of trade and commerce, but it will push the interests of
humanity and of Christianity."

For all these reasons, the Open Door policy was popular in the United
States. In China, however, the policy encountered serious obstacles from
the start. The problem was not so much the response of the great powers.
Although none of them was particularly pleased with Hay's
initiative, they were fearful that partition would lead to war and
impressed that Washington demanded nothing more than simple equality of
commercial access. One by one they grudgingly went along with Hay's
demands—or at least displayed enough ambivalence so that Americans
could assume acquiescence. By far the greater problem was mounting
resentment among the Chinese people, whose real attitudes contradicted the
ethnocentric American fantasy of a docile population that would welcome
modernization from the West. The Boxer Rebellion, the most serious
antiforeign uprising of the period, broke out in 1898 and grew more
serious over the following two years. Armed insurgents slaughtered
hundreds of missionaries and thousands of their Chinese converts and
destroyed foreign property, including the railways and communication lines
integral to Western commerce. In 1900 the Boxers marched on Peking,
killing foreign diplomats and missionaries and, for nearly two months,
laying siege to the foreign legations. To meet the emergency, the McKinley
administration dispatched five thousand U.S. troops from the Philippines
to join the international expeditionary force that raised the siege in
mid-August.

The fighting threw the Open Door policy into disarray. Not only did the
upheaval make a mockery of American insistence that China should be
regarded as an integral, sovereign nation, but the intervention of foreign
troops also presented the possibility that one or more of the imperial
powers would try to exploit the chaotic situation by seizing new parts of
China. "Your Open Door is already off its hinges, not six months
old," the author Henry Adams complained to Hay as the crisis
unfolded. "What kind of door can you rig up?" Hay, once
again relying on Rockhill and Hippisley, responded with his second Open
Door Note on 3 July. The new circular restated American commitments from
the year before and asked the powers to affirm that they supported
China's "territorial and administrative integrity."
U.S. policy, Hay asserted, "is to seek a solution which may bring
about permanent safety and peace to China … and safeguard for the
world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the
Chinese Empire." Meanwhile, American diplomats went to work shoring
up the authority of local rulers in China's center and south to
minimize the temptation for any of the great powers to move in on the
pretext of restoring order.

As in the previous year, American policy succeeded superficially. In 1901
all the powers withdrew from Peking and, unwilling to risk shattering the
status quo, indicated at least tolerance for the Open Door principle. That
result came slowly and reluctantly, however, and various developments
along the way suggested trouble for the Open Door policy over the long
term. First, Russia threatened to exploit the presence of its troops in
China to force the Qing to yield further privileges in Manchuria. Then
American support for the Open Door policy tottered as President McKinley
toyed with the idea of abandoning the policy altogether. Under fierce
election-year criticism for his overseas adventures and frustrated with
great-power maneuvering, McKinley considered withdrawing U.S. troops from
the international force in China, a move that would have destroyed the
concert of powers that Washington had worked hard to maintain. As McKinley
recognized, the move also would have freed the United States to
participate in the partitioning of China by carving out a sphere of its
own, a prospect that gained sudden support among a number of policymakers.
From Peking, U.S. minister E. H. Conger made a startling proposal to
acquire a lease over Zhili province, including apparently the Chinese
capital itself. More modest in its aims, the U.S. Navy called for the
establishment of a base on the Chinese coast, preferably Samsah (Sansha)
Bay in Fujian province. McKinley and even Hay endorsed that proposal, but
China, in an unusual gesture of defiance, rejected it out of hand, quoting
from America's own cherished Open Door principles.

Before 1900 was out, the administration had retreated to the Open Door
policy. The American flirtation with empire in China ended amid grudging
acceptance that exerting influence within the concert of
powers—rather than breaking out on its own—remained the best
course for the United States. But events left Hay keenly aware of the many
problems that beset his policy. There was not, he wrote in late 1900,
"a single power we can rely on for our policy of abstention from
plunder and the Open Door." Nor, he recognized, did the United
States have the military or moral authority to control events in China if
any of the powers chose to oppose American preferences. In a remarkably
candid assessment of the limits of U.S. influence, Hay asserted:

The inherent weakness of our position is this: we do not want to rob
China ourselves, and our public opinion will not permit us to interfere,
with an army, to prevent others from robbing her. Besides, we have no
army. The talk of the papers about "our preeminent moral position
giving us the authority to dictate to the world" is mere
flap-doodle.

American impotence was on display in 1901 as the imperial powers ignored
U.S. protests and demanded that China pay a debilitating $300 million
indemnity to cover foreign property destroyed in the Boxer uprising. When
Japan and the Europeans chose to ignore it, the Open Door policy counted
for little.